I paused. Kingsley’s head was turned towards me and his jaw muscles bulged with the way his teeth were clamped. His eyes looked sick.
“I went downstairs. Signs of a woman having spent the night. Pajamas, face powder, perfume, and so on. Bathroom locked, but got it open. Three empty shells on the floor, two shots in the wall, one in the window. Lavery in the shower stall, naked and dead.”
“My God!” Kingsley whispered. “Do you mean to say he had a woman with him last night and she shot him this morning in the bathroom?”
“Just what did you think I was trying to say?” I asked.
“Keep your voice down,” he groaned. “It’s a shock, naturally.
Why in the bathroom?”
“Keep your own voice down,” I said. “Why not the bathroom? Could you think of a place where a man would be more completely off guard?”
He said: “You don’t know that a woman shot him. I mean, you’re not sure, are you?”
“No,” I said. “That’s true. It might have been somebody who used a small gun and emptied it carelessly to look like a woman’s work. The bathroom is downhill, facing outwards on space and I don’t think shots down there would be easily heard by anyone not in the house. The woman who spent the night might have left—or there need not have been any woman at all. The appearances could have been faked. You might have shot him.”
“What would I want to shoot him for?” he almost bleated, squeezing both kneecaps hard. “I’m a civilized man.”
That didn’t seem to be worth an argument either. I said: “Does your wife own a gun?”
He turned a drawn miserable face to me and said hollowly: “Good God, man, you can’t really think that!”
“Well does she?”
He got the words out in small gritty pieces. “Yes—she does. A small automatic.”
“You buy it locally?”
“I—I didn’t buy it at all. I took it away from a drunk at a party in San Francisco a couple of years ago. He was waving it around, with an idea that that was very funny. I never gave it back to him.” He pinched his jaw hard until his knuckles whitened. “He probably doesn’t even remember how or when he lost it. He was that kind of a drunk.”
“This is working out almost too neatly,” I said. “Could you recognize this gun?”
He thought hard, pushing his jaw out and half closing his eyes. I looked back over the chairs again. One of the elderly snoozers had waked himself up with a snort that almost blew him out of his chair. He coughed, scratched his nose with a thin dried-up hand, and fumbled a gold watch out of his vest. He peered at it bleakly, put it away, and went to sleep again.
I reached in my pocket and put the gun on Kingsley’s hand. He stared down at it miserably.
“I don’t know,” he said slowly. “It’s like it, but I can’t tell.”
“There’s a serial number on the side,” I said.
“Nobody remembers the serial numbers of guns.”
“I was hoping you wouldn’t,” I said. “It would have worried me very much.”
His hand closed around the gun and he put it down beside him on the chair.
“The dirty rat,” he said softly. “I suppose he ditched her.”
“I don’t get it,” I said. “The motive was inadequate for you, on account of you’re a civilized man. But it was adequate for her.”
“It’s not the same motive,” he snapped. “And women are more impetuous than men.”
“Like cats are more impetuous than dogs.”
“How?”
“Some women are more impetuous than some men. That’s all that means. We’ll have to have a better motive, if you want your wife to have done it.”
He turned his head enough to give me a level stare in which there was no amusement. White crescents were bitten into the corners of his mouth.
“This doesn’t seem to me a very good spot for the light touch”, he said. “We can’t let the police have this gun. Crystal had a permit and the gun was registered. So they will know the number, even if I don’t. We can’t let them have it.”
“But Mrs. Fallbrook knows I had the gun.”
He shook his head stubbornly. “We’ll have to chance that. Yes, I know you’re taking a risk. I intend to make it worth your while. If the set-up were possible for suicide, I’d say put the gun back. But the way you tell it, it isn’t.”
“No. He’d have to have missed himself with the first three shots. But I can’t cover up a murder, even for a ten- dollar bonus. The gun will have to go back.”
“I was thinking of more money than that,” he said quietly. “I was thinking of five hundred dollars.”
“Just what did you expect to buy with it?”
He leaned close to me. His eyes were serious and bleak, but not hard. “Is there anything in Lavery’s place apart
